She made a mistake once.

She thought she was wrong, but it turned out she wasn’t.

This is the lesson Wendy Griffith learned in the process of becoming a 53 year old never married career woman.  After five months of dating, Griffith started pushing “Michael” for a marriage proposal.  When Michael told her she was attractive but not marriage material, Griffith pushed for answers:

How could this guy who drove several hours every weekend to see me, spent big bucks on hotels, dinners and flowers and kissed me passionately, not see me as “the one”?…

…Michael told me that he had doubts about our relationship because of the way I had treated him when I was on the road for work, reporting in New York and elsewhere around the country during the previous months. “I didn’t feel like I had a girlfriend when you were traveling,” he told me. “You were so cold and distant.”

I apologized. Perhaps he was right. I had been a bit heavily focused on work, but truth be told, that had been months before, when I still hadn’t been too sure about us.

But the lesson of the book is that if Michael were the man God had chosen for her, he would have wanted to marry Griffith no matter how she treated him.  Later on the same page Griffith confesses her sin, the sin of lacking faith in her own awesomeness (emphasis mine):

All I knew was that fear had seized every part of my being. As irrational as it may sound, I felt as if the circumstances were all my fault. The enemy of my soul had ruthlessly pushed the “rejection button”, and my life would never be the same.